I'll Show You Mine, You Show Me Yours
by Samuraibrarian
Summary: F!Revan and Carth patch each other up after fighting Calo Nord on Tatooine


Calo Nord was, as he had liked to say, very hard to kill. Not, however, impossible. He'd ambushed Meirah, Carth, and Bastila just outside of the Krayt Dragon's lair with a quartet of hired thugs, intending to finish the destructive work of Tatooine's apex predator. It had been a brutal fight, but due to Komad Fortuna's help, they'd started the fight in better condition than the bounty hunter had anticipated, and they'd eventually subdued him permanently.

Bastila, who'd come through the battle relatively unscathed was out in Anchorhead, settling the family business that had led them to the dragon's cave. Carth sat sideways on the single berth in the Ebon Hawk's medbay. Meirah stood behind him, brow furrowed and eyes squinting, using tweezers to pick fragments of his shirt out of a fist-sized burn from a blaster bolt that had caught him in the upper back.

"Thank you for your patience. I've almost got it all. Just a couple of threads yet to go." A collection of shallow vibroblade gashes on her forearms, bandaged but still stinging, adversely affected the steadiness of her hand. The thing of having one damnably attractive pilot half-dressed and more-or-less at her mercy wasn't helping her concentration either.

The muscles under her free hand bunched hard. He hissed as she pulled a tiny shred of cloth free. "Go easy. That hurts."

"I could ask Bastila to complete the job if you'd prefer it. She's got a lot more practice as a healer."

"Sithspit, woman, you may as well have left me to the krayt dragon." He craned his neck around to look at her. "Look, I didn't mean to impugn your doctoring skills; you're doing fine. Just making an observation. I'll try not to be such an infant about it."

She tried to shed the myriad distractions competing for her attention. Bastila was in truth the better healer, though she had all the bedside manner of a broody ronto. Meirah, though, had the beginnings of the same training. If she could stop letting her feelings, or worse, her fear of them, run away with her, she might actually be able to put that training to good use. She wielded the Force as an extension of her hand, feeling out the arrangement of the muscle, bone, and sinew beneath. Crackling somewhere in between was a lacework of nerves. After "listening" to the pulses they passed among themselves few moments, she began to fill the gaps between with a low-volume stream of white noise. The clenched mass of sinew beneath her hand immediately began to unknot.

"Wow, what are you doing back there?"

"A bit of code-slicing on your insides. Really, it's the same thing a neural disruptor does."

"But disruptor collars…hurt. For that matter, I've been in bar-fights that treated me more gently than Medicorps techs, but you just completely took the sting out of that blaster-burn. I thought you said you weren't very good at this."

"I'm not. You're different. I don't know how to explain it." She extracted the last textile scrap the wound. He didn't so much as flinch. "That connection is easier to negotiate with you. You 'share well,' as my masters would say." Hilarious for a man who seemed to oscillate at random between a craving for total openness and equally total isolation.

She picked up the kolto patch she'd laid out ahead of time, placed it over the wound with exaggerated care, and pressed down, sealing the adhesive edges against his skin.

"How long does that disruption effect last?"

"As long as I keep my hands on you, more or less. People who have more skill at this can keep it up over distance, without thinking about it, even."

"Then I guess I'll have to detain you for a while- at least until the painkiller in the kolto takes hold."

She was preoccupied, tracking the progress of her work. The internal mechanisms of a battle-worn soldier presented an interesting contrast to that of the young trainees she'd been permitted to observe in her cursory study at the Enclave. An asymmetry in the neural network caught her eye. She slid one hand across to a spot just under his shoulder blade marked by a dark, circular scar a couple of centimeters in diameter. "You had a major trauma here. What happened?" Following the snag in the pattern, she reached around to his front with her other hand and followed the hollow between his breast and shoulder up to the ridge of collarbone and a matching knot of scar tissue just below it. There was an audible intake of breath. Gooseflesh raised under her fingers.

"Carth? This was a through-and-through with a solid projectile- from the looks of it, a big one. What-" An inch-thick steel shaft skewered her palms and his shoulder between them. The medbay morphed into the tangled wreck of a Conductor-class cockpit, venting acrid, choking smoke. A din of blaster fire, comm static, and soldiers' voices, barking orders, bellowing and moaning in pain filled her ears. A familiar voice superimposed itself over the noise, as if from far away.

"Meirah, you okay?" Carth pulled her hand away from the front of his shoulder. The carnage receded.

"Scorpion bolt?" she leaned into his back, disoriented and struggling to catch her breath. "They still use those? "

"Yeah. Got shot down running the space-lift on Commenor. I pulled off a damned fine landing for an un-powered falling junk-pile. The nest of bolt-throwers I landed in, on the other hand…" He eyed her warily, over his shoulder "Don't suppose I need to ask how you know."

She shook her head "I just saw it. I know of Jedi getting psychometry readings from _things_, but I had no idea it was possible with people, especially not without a concerted effort. I'm not prying on purpose, I promise." Anticipating an oncoming argument, she felt a pang of regret.

He sighed. "You could have asked, you know."

"I did."

"Right," he chuckled sheepishly. "Sorry. I'm not used to the attention. If more medics doctored the way you do, men would be breaking down the door for assignments in contested territory." Surprising her, he replaced her hand on his chest a few inches from its original position. She felt the pulse of his heart under her palm.

"If the bolt had impacted here, you would have died."

"Almost did anyway. Soaked three or four units of blood on the way to the medship alone. Spent a long time in a kolto tank with it; the docs were surprised that I didn't lose the arm."He flexed and wiggled his fingers. "Still hurts sometimes when the weather's bad."

Despite the impressive collection of close calls they'd accumulated in the last few weeks, imagining him permanently maimed or close to death was profoundly unnerving and strange. "Any other near-death trauma that I should know about? For future reference in medical matters, that is."

"None that left marks. Pilots don't usually end up with the same kinds of injuries that the Army grunts do. If it's anything for us, it's usually being vaped along with the ship. What's this? Looks recent. " His fingers skimmed across a dark gray-purple scar originating in the web of her thumb and index finger and terminating on the outside of her forearm near the elbow. "For all that space-jockeys don't have much occasion to get banged up, c-sec slicers have less. I don't have Jedi insight, so you'll have to tell me the story instead."

"Fair's fair, I guess. That one's not nearly so interesting- just embarrassing mostly. I was slicing a research station backbone over Nyriaan a couple of months back. My first big Republic mission. Some Sith lord was snooping around the system, and my COs saw an opportunity. Well, I fat-fingered some command line. Security droid came online and threw me out of the clean room...through a glass wall."

He cringed in sympathy "Nyriaan was a success, if I remember the reports right. Significant Republic casualties, but that Interdictor broke up on entry."

"This is another one that I hope doesn't enter the history books in every excruciating detail. My orders were to install a module that would allow the Republic unrestricted access to all communications back and forth from the station and, of course, to leave it intact. Instead, about a million credits worth of holoserver hardware were destroyed by a combination of being pounded to powder by a berserk boltbucket and bled on by me." She walked around to his front to survey the damage there, sliding the hand on his back up to his nape, and letting it swivel around his neck as she went. His eyes followed her intently . Having his full attention in a situation that didn't involve combat of some kind kindled a strange combination of exhilaration and terror. She reminded herself to concentrate on her work. Scanning with both her eyes and the Force, she found numerous small defensive wounds, but nothing else of note. Thank the Force for armor.

"So you fragged an Interdictor, a Sith lord traveling with a full retinue, and a kriffload of expensive equipment, when you were just meant to be planting a glorified bug?"

"The Republic navy accomplished the fragging. My only contribution was that the corrupted data from my kark-up on the backbone caused a cascade failure- which wouldn't have happened if the Sith believed in appropriate backups- that brought the navcomp down and resulted in the OX sailing a non-dry-dock-able boat into a planetary gravity well. Not so shiny when you think of it that way."

He laughed incredulously and passed a hand through his hair. "That's a hell of an a accident."

"Wait, do that again."

"What?"

She brushed aside his forelock and found a healed scar slanting a finger-length backward into his scalp. The Ebon Hawk's tiny medbay telescoped into a larger hospital ward, filled with bright, harsh lighting, astringent smells and the whirs and beeps of monitoring equipment. Beside her, a blue-gowned nurse laid out a tissue adhesives kit. Blood was beginning to seep through the compress she held to his forehead. The partition brushed aside. A young woman with a tall, shapely build and a thick mane of wavy wheat-blond hair approached the berth, her face animated with concern, and, Meirah thought, likely something else entirely.

"That's from a swoop-bike crash, speaking of embarrassing accidents." Carth supplied. "I was just out of the Academy, working at TSF headquarters at Thani. We had an informal league on-base, and I made my walking-around credits racing with some of the guys in my unit. I got careless, hit a repulsor just wrong and went flying over the nose into the retaining wall.

"Showing off for a girl?"

"That came later, actually. She was a civilian contractor, working the trauma dispatch desk in the medcenter. Said I was the funniest brain-damaged guy she'd ever met." He smiled broadly, but something about the set of his eyes and brow suggested an admixture of gentle, resigned sadness. Nostalgia, maybe?

"Insightful. I'm going to have to remember that one."

"Calo did a fine job, sister; I don't need any further punishment today. And I don't recall asking anyone to snoop around in my head either." There was the Carth she knew.

"That part happens involuntarily. I wish I could stop it." She lifted both hands in a gesture of placation and stepped back, feeling peevish.

His brow creased and jaw clenched. With a ragged sigh, he reached for her hand again.

"Meirah, I'm-"

"Don't apologize. You've got a right to privacy, if you choose it." She re-initiated the disruptor current. "The first item of business, as soon as I can find Jedi who can help, is going to be to figure out how to reliably impose some limitations on what does or doesn't bleed through to my brain every time someone shoulders past me in a crowd. We're almost done. Lemme get those vibroblade scrapes dressed and then I'll quit bothering you." She turned to rifle through one of the cabinets on the wall behind her. She knew she'd seen a stock of salve there before, good for injuries that warranted dressing but were minor enough not to require the allocation of their precious stock of kolto.

"Huh, that's an interesting one; how'd that happen?" He traced a thin ridge of tissue that delineated her spine from bellow the shoulder blade to the hipbone with a slow, feather-light touch. She involuntarily arched her back and shivered, and wisps of hair raised on the back of her neck. Not fair. "Well…Hard to say, really." she said, stalling a few moments to compose herself before turning around. "I'm supposed to have gotten torn up pretty badly on the ground at Mon Gazza. Two solid months on a Republic medship before I came to, more relearning how to do things like walking. Whatever it was, I don't remember much of it at all."

She dabbed salve into the mass of scrapes on his forearm, covered them with a gauze pad, and repositioned his hand to hold the pad in place while she taped it down. A nearby explosion nearly knocked her backward. She was surrounded by the remains of a bombed-out brick building. Rust-colored, foul-smelling dust hung in the air in a thick, disorienting haze, blanketing the ruin and dispersing into the air at the slightest disturbance. He was clawing through the broken scree barehanded, frantic, oblivious to the blood streaming from his knuckles, wrists, and forearms. She heard him bellowing, hoarse-voiced over the rumble of distant artillery strikes and the droning roar of ships' engines. He cradled a limp, dust-covered figure, human and probably female but barely recognizable as either; His cries died abruptly, then resumed as inarticulate, ugly, tearing sobs.

Carth jerked his hand out of her grasp. "I think I can take care of myself from here, thanks." His voice took on the enforced flatness that characterized their early attempts at anything more personal than soldierly shop-talk. He avoided her eyes; he knew what she'd seen. "I've got to go get us ready to lift off. Bastila will be back soon, and she'll be wanting to burn it for Kashyyyk the second her feet hit the deck." Meirah looked on, wide-eyed and unable to speak as he scooted off of the berth, snagged his jacket from the counter and threw it over his shoulders, wincing at the contact of boiled leather against bare skin and recently-dressed wounds. A part of her mind, the only coherent one at the moment, protested that in his rush to leave, he was making a hash of all of her hard work. You and he, both, she thought with a twinge of bitter humor. Jedi powers may have given her some ability to repair hurts and ease pain, but that was of little comfort when they also caused her to reopen wounds that all of the kolto in the galaxy couldn't put right.


End file.
